I think it’s good advice that I’m careful to evaluate why GitHub is a good for judging software popularity. Though, I think it’s also just because it’s the established platform. But, that thought is not a careful consideration. I don’t necessarily want to end up creating a competing product to GitHub, but want to use metrics that people are familiar with and trust already.
The issue with considered ideas and including smaller projects is that it makes it too easy for companies to manipulate the system into their favor. Though, I’m open to suggestions on how it could be improved. I do think it’s possible to collect a royalty for a distributed group of people successfully. (Though, maybe not in corporate interest for it to be successful)
GitHub does have good integration for payments in the US. There’s alternative methods for improving payments, but I do not think it’s relevant for finding a license that developers think is good.
I’ll break down my thought process, but maybe it was a mistake of mine to assume it was too much for the post.
Users of the platform determine approval of a project’s on GitHub. If they don’t want it to be elgible for funding, then they’re not required to star or vote for it. The threshold at 1000 does seem low, especially considering that Microsoft has lots of open source repositories. (They contribute lots!) Though, when comparing the top 500 companies in the US, it starts to look better.
I stated that the person paying the royalty would have to spread their support between 10 or more repositories, with no more than 10% to a single one. I also stated in my post, that I like the idea of changing this to 1%, but mentioned consequences of that. [1] It’s going to be hard for even Microsoft to have 100 highly approved projects on GitHub.
I think companies frequently understand what they wish they had. It’s not that I don’t wish to make it simpler, I would be happy directing a company to a non profit to direct the funds for them. (And my considerations didn’t disallow that at all in what I had stated so far) I just think it makes it a desirable license to companies if they’re allowed to direct funds to projects they find very important.
I don’t disagree. Companies should have discretion to fund people who need money. Companies should be provided the resources so that they can delegate it out easily to someone who cares about it. (if desired) Companies should be able to promote their own interests. I think these are all good.
I also think it’s good that developers who are writing very successful and high quality software are able to do more, like hire more developers than typical. (It just seems like good delegation. There’s likely some things they don’t need to do themselves)
[1] Limiting contributions to 1% (of the royalty contribution) provides less opportunity for a company to choose to highly fund a small group they find individually important. As an example, they may not want to spend more than 5% (of their total income), and this group could have been one they would have otherwise funded if not for the royalty.
After writing all of this, one of the things that I really like about it, is that the license is intended to be compatible with more restrictive versions of it. If a developer thinks 1000 stars is too low, no problem, they can bump it to 10k and it changes for the the other deps that use the same license. (If a company uses the bumped license) If a developer thinks 1k is too much, they can drop it, but it’ll be moved up if a company uses a more restrictive license later